Twitter, a social media medium that at one point was almost as popular as Facebook, has nearly become obsolete. Twitter is a media that allows users to share their thoughts, feelings, pictures and funny quips with those who follow their account. It has it's own lingo: a "tweet" is the name of the blurb of words you publish and a "retweet" is the name of re-quoting a tweet that you particularly like and want to show your followers also.

In the ever expanding and innovative social media market, Twitter seems to have fallen out of favor. I didn't make my own Twitter account until about May of this year. I was late to the trend and appeared to have jumped on board toward the end of its ride. 

As a user late to the game, I never found myself using my relatively new Twitter account as a preferred mode of social networking or communication. It may have been because I just wasn't used to it, or because I realized that not many of my friends used it much anymore. 

One possible source of its decline is very likely the rise of competition, which has exposed some of it's deficits. The character limitation on tweets frustrate authors that want to have unlimited space for their various thoughts or ideas. 

Other criticisms expressed in a brief interview with one of my roommates revealed one of Twitter's other flaws. She commented, "Twitter has too many sponsor ads, which interferes with the satisfaction of interacting on Twitter." The visual clutter makes browsing the Twitter feed less appealing than other types of social media that screen or place advertisements in more eye-pleasing places. 

Additionally, when I questioned a second year on her opinion on the decline of Twitter, she reported, "I think that there are just more superior social media platforms than Twitter that people prefer using. If I want to post a picture, Instagram is more user friendly and gets more attention than pictures on twitter, and if I have a funny thought or opinion that I would prefer to express anonymously, Yik Yak is what I would chose. I don't always want to have my name attached to all the ideas that I wish to vocalize."

As fewer and fewer people use Twitter, the quicker it will decline and truly become a skeleton in the graveyard of pioneering social media platforms. One of Twitters best assets is the feature of following your favorite celebrities' and politicians' Twitter accounts that make followers feel more connected to them and their ideas. If Twitter can find a way to capitalize on this aspect, it stands a chance of survival in the competitive social media world. Otherwise, I think we can expect to see Twitter join the ranks of other obsolete social media networks that have lost out to their newer and more improved competitors.